Celebrity Grave: Nora Eddington, Errol Flynn's Wife #2

Nora Eddington (February 25, 1924 – April 10, 2001) is best known as the second wife of the actor Errol Flynn. She was an American. She also featured as an actress in a number of minor roles in a small number of films.

Nora Eddington was the daughter of Jack Eddington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's office.  She was only eighteen years old when she first met Errol Flynn in February 1943 – at the time, she was working at the courthouse where Flynn's notorious 1943 trial for statutory rape took place. Flynn was acquitted and they were married in 1944 in Mexico. Their daughter, Deirdre, was born on January 10, 1945. By the time that their last child and second daughter, Rory, was born in March 1947, their marriage was already essentially over. The couple were divorced in 1949, but parted on fairly amicable terms, with Eddington (now Eddington Flynn) given custody of the children.

Shortly afterwards, she married Dick Haymes, on July 17, 1949. She and Haymes had been having an affair for some time previously, which had since become public knowledge by way of gossip columns. Her marriage to Haymes lasted four years, a period which Haymes himself later characterized in an unpublished autobiography as "not a Dick Haymes marriage." Eddington suffered a miscarriage during this marriage.After divorcing Haymes, she subsequently married Richard Black, a marriage that lasted for most of the rest of her life – they had a son named Kevin, who died from leukemia aged 10 years old. The Blacks were divorced by the time of Nora Eddington's death.

Although thanked (as Nora Eddington Black) for her help in the preface, Eddington was highly critical of Charles Higham's biography of her first husband, Errol Flynn, the Untold Story, stating to Maggie Daly of the Chicago Tribune: "I resent Higham's book because it is a fraud. He hasn't come up with a single document about Errol's supposed tie-in with the Gestapo, but continues to go around the country saying he has." Her own book, about her life with Flynn and entitled Errol and Me, was published in 1960.

Death

Nora Eddington Flynn died in 2001, aged 77,  after a long battle with kidney disease, at Cedars Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles. She was interred in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, next to her son Kevin.

Filmography

This is a partial list only. She starred in a few films only, roles mostly arising through her connection with Errol Flynn.

Adventures of Don Juan (1948).
Cruise of the Zaca (1952).